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Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
First, there were elegant programming features in Hope, particularly pattern matching and clausal function definitions; second, there were ideas on modular construction of specifications, using signatures in the interfaces. The Talk page of that article contains an unresolved discussion of this issue, with links to a highly upvoted SO answer and another one whose references don’t provide first-hand account of the origins of the term. That interpretation might have been in some people’s mind in the 70s and 80s, even if only as a funny coincidence, but I haven’t found any written evidence of it except maybe this one sentence in a later paper, Some history of programming languages by David Turner (2012):
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